#technosystem

The politics of technology grows out of the technical mediations that underlie the many social groups that make up society. A worker in a factory, a nurse in a hospital, a truck driver in his truck—all are members of social groups that exist through the technologies they employ. Consumers and victims of the side effects of technology form latent groups that surface when they become aware of their shared experience. Encounters between individuals and the technologies that connect them proliferate with a myriad of consequences. Social identities and worlds emerge simultaneously and form the backbone of a modern society. In the terminology of science and technology studies, they “co-produce” each other. Co-production has a paradoxical structure nicely illustrated by M. C. Escher’s famous print Drawing Hands. In his book Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter described Escher’s self-drawing hands as a “strange loop” and an “entangled hierarchy.”8 These terms refer to an unusual type of logical relation in which top and bottom change places. Artist and drawing stand in a hierarchy, the active side at the top, the passive side at the bottom. In the print both hands play both roles; the hierarchy is entangled in a strange, endless loop.

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Like these examples of strange loops, society and technology are inextricably imbricated. Social groups exist through the technologies that bind their members together. In this they resemble the drawn hand of Escher’s print. But once bound together the members gain a power over the technologies that bind them. They take the place of the hand that draws. Formed and conscious of their identity, technologically mediated groups influence technical design through their choices and protests. In so doing they reiterate the original paradox of democracy: self-rule is an entangled hierarchy. As the French revolutionary Saint-Just put it in 1791, “The people is a submissive monarch and a free subject.”